A:\u00a0 But expensive shampoo is still just shampoo.\u00a0 It’s not faith.<\/p>\n
![\"Cockleburs](\"https:\/\/jenniferthomas.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Cockleburs-October-2014.jpg\")
<\/a>“Jesus said: The Kingdom is like a man with a treasure of which he is unaware hidden in his field. He died and left the field to his son. His son knew nothing about it and, having received the field, sold it. The owner came and, while plowing, found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to anybody he wished (Gospel of Thomas 109). Paul, who came after Jesus and Jesus’ confused disciples, saw the opportunity to take the buried treasure of faith offered by Jesus and lend it out to others with a promissory note for future salvation. Obedience was the interest Paul charged.\u00a0 In this photo, the cockleburs that can stick to your hair and clothing as you walk through field and forest are like Paul’s teachings: covered in nasty hooks but very effective. Photo credit JAT 2014.<\/p><\/div>\n
J:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 It’s not faith.\u00a0 But as you and I have discussed before, religion and faith are not synonymous with each other.\u00a0 Religion is an organized social, political, and economic institution, an institution that can be used under certain circumstances to create a desire for obedience among the middle and lower classes of society.\u00a0 As a tool for creating social cohesion, it can be quite effective — at least, for a while.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 Social cohesion is good.\u00a0 But people still need faith!\u00a0 People long to feel that deep inner connection with God that makes them feel whole.<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 So within the annals of a religion such as Christianity, you see a constant tension between the people who are seeking God — that is, people who are yearning for faith — and the people who don’t give a hoot about God but are seeking to tap into the hidden power that underlies all universal laws.\u00a0 The ones who don’t give a hoot about God are the ones who have dictated the path of orthodoxy in the Christian church as it’s known today.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 So you mean there were church leaders who didn’t actually believe in God?\u00a0 Who were atheists or maybe agnostics?<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 Let’s put it this way.\u00a0 The vast majority of church leaders whose writings have been preserved were not writing about God.\u00a0 They were writing about Paul’s Spirit — Divine Law writ large.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 I noticed in my theology courses that orthodox theologians over the centuries relied heavily on Paul and much less on Mark, Matthew, and Luke for scriptural authority.<\/p>\n
J (nodding):\u00a0 Paul is the biblical source for Trinitarian theology.\u00a0 John is usually considered a source, too, but John’s personal theology wasn’t as sophisticated as Paul’s, and didn’t have as much influence.\u00a0 Mark contains no Trinitarian theology, and not much usable Christology, either, from the point of view of Paul and his successors.\u00a0 Paul’s writings, though, are a font of “wisdom” on the topic of tapping into the hidden power of the universe.\u00a0 I say that facetiously.<\/p>\n
A:\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 So tell me more about Paul’s Trinitarian theology.\u00a0 You seem to be making a link between Paul’s Trinitarian teachings and the theme of selling God as a shampoo brand.\u00a0 But I confess you’ve lost me.\u00a0 I don’t quite see the connection.\u00a0 Could you explain that?<\/p>\n
J:\u00a0 In the time when I lived, philosophy and religion and science were hopelessly intertwined.\u00a0 They were intertwined in a way that’s hard for people today to relate to.\u00a0 Chemistry and physics and medicine weren’t treated as subjects that were separate from philosophy or religion.\u00a0 They were treated as subjects that were subordinate to, or dependent upon, the highest aspirations of the human mind: pure philosophy or pure religious law.\u00a0 But devotion to philosophy or devotion to pure religious law (as in the case of the Essenes in my day) were both attempts to understand the immutable laws that lie behind everything that happens here on Planet Earth.\u00a0 So when you tried to study chemistry, you weren’t really studying chemistry.\u00a0 You were looking for the hidden religious laws that governed the chemistry.\u00a0 You were looking for the religious laws that applied not only to the metals you were extracting from base ores but to the people in your religious community.\u00a0 You were looking for the universal principles of authority, power, dominion, status, and chosenness.\u00a0 You were looking for proof — validation — that your religious teachings were correct and other groups’ teachings were wrong.\u00a0 So science was usually a means to an end — a religious<\/em> end.\u00a0 Needless to say, this got in the way of objective scientific research.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 That mindset still exists in certain quarters today.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 But during the first century CE, the religious leaders who had the most credibility, the widest acceptance, were the ones who tried hardest to crystallize the mysteries of Divine Law, philosophy, and science into a simplified “package.”\u00a0 Paul was very good at this.\u00a0 He squeezed Law, philosophy, and science together into one shampoo bottle.\u00a0 Then he shook them up hard so you couldn’t see the separate strands and try to pull them apart.\u00a0 He labelled the product as “God.”\u00a0 But what Paul described as God has nothing to do with God the Mother and God the Father as they actually are.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Still not getting it.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Paul wasn’t interested in knowing who I was as a person.\u00a0 Paul wasn’t interested in knowing who God the Mother and God the Father were as people.\u00a0 He was only interested in his agenda of proving his own authority.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 His authority as a messenger of God?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 His authority as an avenging angel, sent to Planet Earth to spread the true message about Spirit — pure, formless, timeless, insuperable Law.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 He wasn’t trying to teach people about God?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Like all severe narcissists, Paul was incapable of conceiving of God as a person — or as two people, which is what I taught.\u00a0 Narcissists can’t see anybody except themselves.\u00a0 They can’t see their own children as separate, worthy human beings, so they certainly can’t see God as separate, worthy beings.\u00a0 For narcissists, the world fractures into many different forms of myth — monistic myths, dualistic myths, and hierarchical myths.\u00a0 This is the only way they can make sense of their own internal suffering, their own internal experience of emptiness.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 But Spirit is different because Spirit isn’t a person — it’s a formless cloud of endless power.\u00a0 I get it.\u00a0 It’s a projection!\u00a0 The narcissist is projecting his own internal self-image onto the universe around him.\u00a0 Spirit is pure power, pure ascendancy, pure authority<\/em> — with no need at all for messy emotions like forgiveness or devotion or courage or trust!\u00a0 I get it!<\/p>\n Okay.\u00a0 So how does this relate to Trinitarian theology?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Paul’s invocation of Spirit, God, and Jesus Christ is alchemy.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Alchemy?\u00a0 Now my head is really starting to hurt.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 When you try to force the actual laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and math to conform to pure religious law, pure religious authority, you’re practising alchemy.\u00a0 I’m defining alchemy as an attempt to control all the powers of “chaos” for the purpose of creating order and harmony.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 By “powers of chaos” you mean things like\u00a0 . . . entropy?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I mean God the Mother and God the Father as they actually are.\u00a0\u00a0 In Paul’s view, and in the view of many of his successors, God has not been behaving properly, and has done very illogical and unfair things such as allowing earthquakes to hit major religious centres and requiring saintly figures to die like everybody else.\u00a0 This implication is so clear in Paul’s teachings that a century or so later in Rome one of his most enthusiastic followers, Marcion, would create a firestorm of controversy by suggesting there was a hierarchy of gods in Creation, with a jealous, vindictive god who rules over this world, and above him, a supreme god who is just and loving but who remains “unknown” to people on Earth except through the revelation of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 For Marcion, Paul was the messenger of this great and radical truth about the unknown god.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 So Paul was trying to force both God and you to “obey” Spirit, which is the supreme and formless cloud of knowing and love and justice?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 Exactly.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 By squishing you all together into “One”?<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 He would have thought of it as “reintegrating” broken pieces of divine truth that had fallen out of their proper places.\u00a0 Pieces such as the Logos<\/em> (me).\u00a0 And Charis<\/em> (grace), who was Paul’s God.<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Frig.\u00a0 This is so complicated.\u00a0 And so Gnostic<\/em>.\u00a0 I like your teaching about God as two loving parents much better.\u00a0 Paul’s version is so\u00a0 . . . so fluid.\u00a0 So malleable.\u00a0 So nebulous and undefined.\u00a0 So conveniently changeable.\u00a0 So easily manipulated, depending on the circumstances.<\/p>\n J:\u00a0 In a previous post you described the Trinity as a shell game.\u00a0 That definition still applies.<\/p>\n